Dominique Stender Good software is only the beginning

Tools for a mobile office

I'm constantly trying to boost my productivity. For me that includes to enable myself to write ideas down instantly. In the present age of the smartphone, the question is no longer which device you should use to write down notes on the go but instead it is: Which applications should I use?

In this article I will present my current tool set of choice for the iPhone.

Word processor and spreadsheets

Quickoffice (iTunes) is pretty much what is claims to be. You get a Word editor and a spreadsheet application. Both natively work with Microsoft Office formats (old and new) and that is all I need.

The user interface for both applications is easy to learn and while the lack of keyboard and mouse does slow you down when editing spreadsheets, the app makes good use of gestures and multiple-tap events.

What I found to be missing however is the possibility to set headlines and other formats. Note that they are displayed and preserved correctly. You simply can't add new ones. The usual text decorations like bold, italic and the like work smoothly though.

You can up and download documents through a WebDAV interface. The MobileMe iDisk online storage is also supported but that isn't for me - I value the privacy of my data.

Strangely there doesn't seem to be a straight forward way to copy a file. You have to open the original, make a subtle change and 'save as...'.

Overall Quickoffice let's me get my work done and does it in a rather effective manner, for an ok price.

Aside from the 'pure' office functionalities Quickoffice supports a number of other file formats including images and .pdf, for which it provides readers/viewers. While rounding things up nicely, these readers lack some of the oomph that the Files app provides, see below.

Mind mapping

I can't exist without mindmaps. To me they are the organizing and structuring tool of choice. On the computer I use Freemind, because it is open source and it's many keyboard shortcuts make creating and editing a mindmap really fast.

There are many mindmapping tools for the iPhone but I believe iThoughts (iTunes) is a clear winner here. It supports virtually all major mindmapping formats and makes clever use of drag and drop on the iPhone. Nodes can be individually styled and highlighted with icons - important for me for additional grouping and priorisation.

Once again, files can be up and downloaded through a WebDAV Interface or through an online storage service, in this case box.net.

Same as above, mobile storage doesn't work for me and I believe it shouldn't be an option for any business use. Your data simply isn't save.

Generic file storage

The Files application (iTunes) is a WebDAV accessible storage medium on your iPhone. Think of it as a WiFi stick.

You can set up a quota how much space on the device Files can take up and security is provided through an access password.

Note: It can savely be assumed that the content of the storage remains unencrypted, the password most likely serves only as access prevention.

What I like about Files is that it supports reader functionality for most common formats, including .pdf, office formats and an image viewer much like the Photo application from Apple.

Offline bookmarks

Instapaper.com provides you with a simple service: You can bookmark websites to read them later, categorize them, tag them, you name it.

What makes Instapaper stick out of their competition is the good integration. Granted, a browser bookmarklet is nothing special anymore, neither is an iPhone app. Make the iPhone app (iTunes) communicate with one of the most frequently used Twitter clients (Twitteriffic) and make that communication both ways and you have created a huge amount of added usability right there. This is what Instapaper did. Tweet your latest finds right from the Instapaper app. Push articles from the people you follow into your Instapaper list without changing the app.

This is what I do - each morning during breakfast I add all potentially interesting links from Twitter to Instapaper, update the archive in the Instapaper app and I'm ready to go, able to read those articles whenever I want and indepepdent of network availability.

Summary

With Quickoffice, iThoughts and Files, there are three applications that bring their own storage logic and their own WebDAV interface.

It would be great if Quickoffice and iThoughts could team up with the guys from OliveToast (creators of the Files app) to utilize their storage for easier maintenance.

A very similar cooperation is already in place between Amidio and Intua, both creators of top notch music creation and sequencing applications for the iPhone. You can record a sample in one app, i.e. Hexatone or Noise.io, then fire up Beatmaker and load that sample through a common storage to sequence it with other samples. Recently that was simplyfied even further: Now you can copy-paste samples between the apps using the iPhone copy-paste logic.

Doing this for the office apps would greatly increase productivity.

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